With the increasing use by television viewers of digital video recorders (DVRs) to avoid traditional commercial advertising on television and in similar media, product placement is increasingly becoming important as a tool for advertisers to reach consumers. For example, an advertiser may arrange for a particular article to be used in a movie by a popular actress, with the expectation that such use will project a positive product image to consumers and thereby increase sales.
However, product placement is not without its drawbacks. For one, artistic concerns typically dictate that product placement be substantially less obtrusive than traditional commercial advertising (e.g., prominent and repeated display of the name of the article is generally avoided), thus, it may not be clear to viewers what specific article or brand is being depicted. Additionally, even if the article is identifiable, a viewer's potential interest in learning more about or in purchasing the article may be eroded by the time delay between the article being depicted and the viewer having access to the information or to a purchasing opportunity.
Several methods have been proposed for allowing consumers to interact with media depicting product placements, for example to retrieve additional information about a depicted article on demand. However, the enabling technology is still in its relatively early stages, and the user interfaces are therefore typically cumbersome. Moreover, the implementation methodologies tend to be computationally complex and therefore quite expensive. In addition, if the advertising information relating to a product placement is embedded in the media stream itself, it is generally impractical or impossible to add, modify or delete this information. This decreases the value of the advertising over time, due to changes in various characteristics of the placed article, such as the article's retail price and/or availability.
Moreover, these same concerns often carry over to other popular but less traditional forms of media. For instance, services that provide on-demand access to video content over the Internet or another distribution channel (e.g., wherein a filmmaker creates and then uploads a video to an access provider and the access provider then makes the video available for viewing by others, potentially including the general public) are becoming increasingly popular. In some cases, the access provider provides additional functionality, such as enabling viewers to search for specific video content of interest, ranking the videos by viewer popularity, and allowing the community of viewers to rate and post commentary about particular videos.
Providing such services is expensive, particularly with respect to the storage costs and bandwidth transmission costs associated with presenting significant volumes of video content to a large audience. Therefore, a robust revenue stream is required to make a video access provider financially viable and sustainable. Present access providers attempt to generate revenue by various means including by charging users a video hosting fee, by charging viewers a subscription or pay-per-view fee, or, most popularly, by presenting advertising information to the viewing audience via pre-video or post-video commercials, banner ads, pop-up ads, and other types of advertising. In the latter case, revenue models for online video access providers typically face the same challenge that traditional media faces: how to associate effective advertising with the video content while not appearing to intrude on the viewer experience or on the creative integrity of the filmmaker.
In naïve advertising models, the advertising that is presented to viewers of online video is selected randomly and without reference to the subject matter or other characteristics of the specific video content being viewed. In more sophisticated models, access providers strive to improve the relevancy of the advertising they present by leveraging the data and processes that are intended primarily to enable viewers to find video content of interest. This can be accomplished, for example, by referencing information from the video itself (generated, for example, using speech recognition, text recognition, or other technologies for determining the subject matter of a given video) and/or by referencing the search terms that have been input by viewers in their efforts to locate a specific video.
Although such methods have proven to be somewhat effective in enabling video “search” in the online video context, the subject matter-related information that is obtained and/or utilized by such methods is generally too inaccurate, too misleading, too vague, too specific, and/or too voluminous to enable the effective selection and presentation of relevant advertising.
The deficiencies described above are compounded by the fact that effective advertising targeting requires subject matter information to be comprehended within the context of the overall viewing experience. Currently, the automated systems that are necessary to deal with the tremendous volume of videos that are hosted by successful online video access providers (particularly with respect to “user-generated” content) are incapable of addressing such contextual elements. For example, even if an automated system were to recognize that a given video contained subject matter regarding “buying a new sport utility vehicle (SUV),” the system might fail to comprehend and/or take into account the fact that the context of the subject matter was a warning about the adverse impact of SUVs on global warming (and, as such, represented an undesirable advertising placement for an SUV manufacturer).
Furthermore, current advertising targeting systems lack the capacity to address the important connection between the subject matter and context of a video and the demographics and interests of likely viewers of such video. For example, absent specific instructions that have been formulated in advance (and are, therefore, very costly to provide on a large scale), current systems are incapable of surmising that a viewer who is interested in viewing a video warning against purchasing an SUV might also be interested in viewing advertising about seemingly unrelated subject matter such as organic foods, energy-saving light bulbs, trips to see the melting glaciers of Kilimanjaro or the campaign of a local “Green” politician.
Finally, many of the methods that are typically used by access providers to present advertising (e.g., pre-roll, pop-up, or overlay advertising) are intrusive and/or disruptive of the viewing experience, thereby interfering with the filmmaker's creative control over the presentation of his or her video and marring the quality of the viewer's viewing experience.
For these and other reasons, advertising methods conventionally used by online video access providers cause filmmakers to be less willing to create or share videos, viewers to be less willing to watch videos, and advertisers to place a lesser value on the advertising “inventory” offered for sale by the access providers. As a result, online video access providers fail to maximize the potential revenue opportunity represented by their viewing audiences.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for annotating media streams such as television, hosted online video and the like to provide more effective, user-friendly advertising.